"Robert Charles Wilson - Divided by Infinity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

DIVIDED BY
INFINITY
Robert Charles Wilson




1.

In the year after LorraineтАЩs death I contemplated suicide six
times. Contemplated it seriously, I mean: six times sat with the fat
bottle of clonazepam within reaching distance, six times failed to
reach for it, betrayed by some instinct for life or disgusted by my
own weakness.
 I canтАЩt say I wish I had succeeded, because in all likelihood I
did succeed, on each and every occasion. Six deaths. No, not just
six. An infinite number.
Times six.
There are greater and lesser infinities.
But I didnтАЩt know that then.


I was only sixty years old.
I had lived all my life in the city of Toronto. I worked
thirty-five years as a senior accountant for a Great Lakes cargo
brokerage called Steamships Forwarding, Ltd., and took an early
retirement in 1997, not long before Lorraine was diagnosed with
the pancreatic cancer that killed her the following year. Back then
she worked part-time in a Harbord Street used-book shop called
Finders, a short walk from the university district, in a part of the
city we both loved.
I still loved it, even without Lorraine, though the gloss had
dimmed considerably. I lived there still, in a utility apartment over
an antique store, and I often walked the neighborhoodтАФdown
Spadina into the candy-bright intricacies of Chinatown, or west to
Kensington, foreign as a Bengali marketplace, where the smell of
spices and ground coffee mingled with the stink of sun-ripened
fish.
Usually I avoided Harbord Street. My grief was raw enough
without the provocation of the bookstore and its awkward
memories. Today, however, the sky was a radiant blue, and the
smell of spring blossoms and cut grass made the city seem
threatless. I walked east from Kensington with a mesh bag filled
with onions and Havarti cheese, and soon enough found myself on
Harbord Street, which had moved another notch upscale since the
old days, more restaurants now, fewer macrobiotic shops, the palm
readers and bead shops banished for good and all.
But Finders was still there. It was a tar-shingled Victorian
house converted for retail, its hanging sign faded to illegibility. A
three-legged cat slumbered on the cracked concrete stoop.